Time creates chasms in memory.
asserted
Time → create → memory
Past lives become increasingly opaque.
asserted
lives → become → ?
Recently, my son took me for yum cha and gave me a present.
asserted
son → take → present
These moments will become placeholders of memory.
asserted
moments → become → memory
He is named after my father, Anastasios.
asserted
He → name → father
It has been 33 years since my father died of liver cancer.
asserted
father → die → cancer
Anastasios was 62 when he died, two years younger than I am now.
asserted
I → die → ?
I was 31 and had just moved to Melbourne from Adelaide.
asserted
I → move → Adelaide
I had vowed never to live in Adelaide longer than I had to.
asserted
I → vow → Adelaide
My old man understood.
asserted
man → understand → ?
If I could not live in Athens, or Vienna, two cities I had lived in the 1980s, then it would have to be Melbourne.
“You need to expand son, and you can’t do that here,” he would say.
uncertain
he → live → that
My mother never wanted me to leave Adelaide.
asserted
me → want → Adelaide
Obsessed by my fledgling career in the arts, I tried to not think of his cancer.
asserted
I → obsess → cancer
In his memoir, which I have tried to read since, but can only scan before tears drown me, he’d written, “My son the optimist pretends that things will be OK, and to help him I pretend I will not die.”
asserted
I → try → him
Two days before he died, I went back to Adelaide on the Overland train.
asserted
I → die → train
Flights were not cheap, and I was not cashed up.
asserted
I → cash → ?
“I don’t think Dad will make it,” my sister said when I arrived.
asserted
I → think → it
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
asserted
I → say → ?
My desire for positive news overtook me.
asserted
desire → overtake → me
Dad’s yellowed skin stretched over bones, skeletal, eyes sunken and could hardly muster a word.
uncertain
eyes → stretch → word
I tried not to break down in front of him.
asserted
I → try → him
By the second day of my visit, he was rushed to hospital.
asserted
he → rush → hospital
He could not breathe; the cancer had colonised his lungs, his bones, his pancreas, everything.
uncertain
cancer → breathe → everything
The time had come.
asserted
time → come → ?
“Do you think he needs more morphine?” he kept asking.
asserted
he → think → morphine
“Yes,” I kept saying.
asserted
I → say → ?
My sister, six years younger, cared for him, but I did not want her to see him die, so I took her home.
asserted
I → care → her
She never forgave me for that.
asserted
She → forgave → that
When I came back I saw my mother bent over his lifeless body on the dimly lit hospital bed.
asserted
mother → come → bed
“My man, my husband, my lover, you have gone … what am I going to do now?” she kept repeating like a mantra.
asserted
she → go → mantra
He was annoyed that I was not reading what he called, “Serious literature, Zola, Kazantzakis, or Steinbeck.”
asserted
he → read → what
Since his death I have read them.
asserted
I → read → them
He was also irritated by what he termed my “infatuation with the trendy left” not “serious communism”.
asserted
he → term → left
He had, like much of his generation, witnessed the horror of Nazi Occupation and then the Greek Civil War, the fratricide.
asserted
He → witness → Occupation
He’d walked to high school in Patra and borne witness to partisan heads lined neatly in a row on the footpath.
asserted
He → walk → footpath
I repeated his story to a colleague in media, recently, and she, maybe 20 years younger than me, questioned my veracity.
asserted
she → repeat → veracity
My father’s words, come out of me when I accuse my 24-year-old son of being “too woke”, whatever that is.
asserted
that → come → son
He liked Harris Tweed jackets, smoked expensive tobacco, and thought it beneath him to work in factories — yet he called for the proletariat to rise.
asserted
proletariat → like → factories
Instead he gambled and was good at it.
asserted
he → gamble → it
Migration never suited my old man.
asserted
Migration → suit → man
…and 7 more, not listed.
The Aporia
